The history of the lost causes is instructive, however, not only as showing us a new aspect of the value of loyalty, namely, what I have just called the link between loyalty and religion, but also as showing us something of the way in which grief, and imagination, and the stir ring of our whole human nature to its very depths, through loss and through defeat, have served in the past as means of training in loyalty. This school of adversity has often been a hard one. But the loyalty that has been trained in this school has produced for us some of humanity's most precious spiritual treasures. Thus, then, through personal leaders and through suffering, loyalty learns to idealize its cause.
VI What is the lesson of all the foregoing when we ask: How shall we ourselves seek training in loyalty?
The first answer is obvious: Whatever our cause, we need personal leaders. And how shall we be surest of finding such personal leaders? Shall we look exclusively to those who are fellow- servants of our own chosen special causes? We all do this. Yet this is often not enough. Familiarity and personal misunderstandings often interfere with the guidance that our fellow-servants give us. We need the wider outlook. Close friendships are amongst the most powerful supports of loyalty. Yet when people confine themselves to regarding their close friends as their leaders in loyalty, they often become narrow and for get the cause of universal loyalty. Much of the art of loyalty, consequently, depends upon training yourself to observe the loyal who are all about you, however remote their cause is from yours, however humble their lives. It is well also, whenever you have to fight, to learn the art of honoring your opponent's loyalty, even if you learn of it mainly through feeling the weight and the sharpness of his sword. "It is a deep cut; but a loyal enemy was he who could give it to me" -to think in such terms is to lighten the gloom of conflict with what may sometimes be more precious than a transient victory; for at such moments of honoring the loyally dangerous enemy, we begin to learn that all the loyal are in spirit serving, however unwittingly, the same universal cause. To be sure, when men have once sufficiently learned that lesson, they cease to fight. But while fighting lasts, if you cannot love your enemy, it is a beautiful thing to be able to enjoy the sight of his loyalty.
But men have not to fight one another in order to display loyalty. Open your eyes, then, to observe better the loyalty of the peaceful, as well as of the warriors. Consider especially the loyalty of the obscure, of the humble, of your near neighbors, of the strangers who by chance come under your notice. For such exemplars of loyalty you always have. Make them your leaders. Regard every loyal man as your leader in the service of the cause of universal loyalty.
VII But our review of the history of loyalty taught us another lesson. We need not only leaders. We need to idealize our causes; that is, to see in them whatever most serves to link them to the cause of universal loyalty.
And the procedure whereby our causes are to be idealized is one involving a range of possible experiences and activities far too vast to be adequately surveyed in our present discussion. Here belong all those practically valuable rela tions between loyalty and art, and between loyalty and religion, which the history of man kind illustrates and which we can use in our own training for loyalty. Art supports loyalty whenever it associates our cause with beautiful objects, whenever it sets before us the symbols of our cause in any worthy expression, and whenever, again, by showing us any form of the beautiful, it portrays to us that very sort of learning and unity that loyalty cease lessly endeavors to bring into human life. Thus viewed, art may be a teacher of loyalty. To say this is in no wise to prejudge the fa mous question regarding the main purpose of art, and the relation of this purpose of art to the moral life. I am attempting here no theory of art. But it belongs to our present province merely to insist that part of our education in loyalty is to be won through whatever love of beauty and whatever knowledge of the beau tiful we possess. The monuments of any cause that possesses monuments should associate our love of this cause with our love for beauty. Our personal causes, if they are worthy at all, need beautiful symbols to express to us their preciousness. Whatever is beautiful appears to us to embody harmonious relations. And the practical search for harmony of life consti tutes loyalty. And thus training for loyalty includes the knowledge of the beautiful.
Still more universal in its efficacy as an idealizer of private and personal causes is religion. In how far a genuinely religious experience results from loyalty, and in how far loyalty bears witness to any religiously significant truth, we have hereafter to see. Our closing lectures will deal with the bearing of loyalty upon religion. But we have here to mention, in passing, the converse relation; namely, the influence of religion upon loyalty. We have to point out how large a part of the function of religion in human affairs consists in the idealizing of our loyalties, by linking our causes, whatever they are, to a world which seems to us to be superhuman.
VIII Art and religion, however, are not our only * means for teaching ourselves to view our personal causes as linked with universal hu man interests, and with an unseen superhu man world. Sorrow, defeat, disappointment, failure, whenever these result from our efforts to serve a cause, may all be used to teach us the same lesson. How such lessons have been taught to humanity at large, the history of those lost causes which have been, even because of the loss, transformed into causes of permanent and world-w^ide importance, has now shown us. This lesson of the history of the lost causes is, however, one that has deep importance for our individual training. We do not always read this lesson aright. To keep our loyalty steadfast through defeat is something that we often view as a sort of extra strain upon loyalty, — the overcoming of a painful hindrance to loyalty. We ought not so to view the matter. Defeat and sorrow, when they are incurred in the service of a cause, ought rather to be a positive aid to loyalty. If we rightly view them, they will prove to be such an aid. For they enable us to see whether we have really given ourselves to the cause, or whether what we took for loyalty was a mere flare of sanguine emotion. When sorrow over a defeat in the service of our cause reverberates all through us, it can be made to reveal whatever loyalty we have. Let us turn our attention to this revelation, even while we suffer. We shall then know for what we have been living. And whoever, once deliberately dwelling upon his cause at a moment of defeat, does not find the cause dearer to him because of his grief, has indeed yet to learn what loyalty is. The cause, furthermore, when viewed in the light of our sorrow over our loss of its present for tunes, at once tends to become idealized, — as the lost throne of David was idealized by Israel, and as the departed Master's cause was idealized by the early church.
The disciples, in the well-known story, say concerning their lost Master to the stranger whom they meet on the lonely road to Emmaus: " We had trusted that it was he who should have redeemed Israel." But soon after "their eyes were opened, and they knew him, and he vanished out of their sight." Amongst all the legends of the risen Lord, this one most completely expresses the spirit of that loyalty which, triumphing even through defeat, win ning the spirit even through the loss of a visible presence, was thereafter to conquer its world.
Now, the lesson of such experiences, as his tory records them, relates not merely to great movements and to mankind at large. It is a personal lesson. It concerns each one of us. I repeat: View your sorrow by itself, and it is a blind and hopeless fact; view your cause in the light of your sorrow, and the cause becomes transfigured. For you learn hereby that it was not this or that fortune, nor even this or that human life which constituted your cause. There was from the beginning, about your cause, something that to human vision seems superpersonal, unearthly as well as earthly. Now the memory of whatever is lost about your cause is peculiarly adapted to bring to your consciousness what this superpersonal element has been. I have already mentioned the merely psychological aspects of the pro cess that, in such cases, goes on. The gla mour which memory throws about the past, the awakening of the imagination when some visible presence is removed, the stimulating reaction from the first stroke of sorrow when ever we are able once more to think of our cause itself, the transformation of our own ideas about the cause, by virtue of the very fact that, since our loss has so changed life, the cause can no longer be served in the old way, and must be the object of new efforts, and so of some new form of devotion, — all these are the idealizing motives which are present when defeat comes. I insist, — human loyalty can never be perfected without such sorrow. Re gard defeat and bereavement, therefore, as loyalty's opportunity. Use them deliberately as means for idealizing the cause, and so far bringing your personal cause into closer touch with the cause of universal loyalty.
The most familiar of all those blows of for tune which seem to us, for the moment, to make our personal cause a lost cause, is death, when it comes to those with whom our per sonal cause has so far been bound up. And yet what motive in human life has done more to idealize the causes of individuals than death has done? Death, viewed as a mere fact of human experience, and as a merely psychologi cal influence, has been one of the greatest idealizers of human life. The memory of the dead idealizes whatever interest the living have in former days shared with the departed. Reverence for the dead dignifies the effort to carry on the work that they began, or that, if they died in childhood, our fond desire would have had them live to do. From the beginning a great portion of the religious imagination of mankind has centred about the fact of death. And the same motive works to-day in the minds of all the loyal, whatever their faith.
Idealize your cause. This has been our maxim for the present aspect of our personal training in loyalty. I have offered merely some hints as to how this maxim may be carried into effect. How science can join with art and with religion, how joyous friendly intercourse can in its own place cooperate with our experiences of sorrow to teach us the lessons of idealizing our common causes, — all this I can only indi cate.
And thus we have before us two of the methods whereby individual loyalty is trained. The deliberate fixing of our attention upon the doings of loyal people, the deliberate use of those methods of human nature which tend to idealize our cause, — these are means for training in loyalty.
Yet one method remains, — it is the most commonplace, yet often the hardest of all. Loyalty means giving the Self to the Cause. And the art of giving is learned by giving. Strain, endurance, sacrifice, toil, — the dear pangs of labor at the moments when perhaps defeat and grief most seem ready to crush our powers, and when only the very vehemence of labor itself saves us from utter despair, — these are the things that most teach us what loyalty really is. I need not enlarge here upon an ancient and constantly repeated lesson of life, — a lesson which is known to all of you. The partisans of war often glorify war as a moralizer of humanity, because, as they say, only the greatest strains and dangers can teach men true loyalty. I do not think that war is needed for such lessons. The loyalty of the most peaceful enables us all to experience, sooner or later, what it means to give, whatever it was in our power to give, for the cause, and then to see our cause take its place, to human vision, amongst the lost causes. When such experiences come, let us face them without hesitation. For all these things together,— our personal friends who inspire us to the service of our own causes, the hosts of the loyal whom we know so little, but who constitute the invisible church of those who live in the spirit, the griefs that teach us the glory of what our human vision has lost from its field, the imagination that throws over all the range of human life its idealizing light, the labors that leave us breathless, the crushing defeats that test our devotion, — well, these, these are all only the means and the ministers whereby we are taught to enter the realm of spiritual truth.
VII LECTURE VII IN closing my last lecture I said that what ever trains us in the arts of loyalty enables us to enter into a world of spiritual truth. These words were intended to indicate that the loyal life has another aspect than the one hitherto most emphasized in these lectures. Our foregoing account has been deliberately one-sided. We have been discussing the moral life as if one could define a plan of conduct without implying more about man's place in the real universe than we have yet made ex plicit in these lectures. Hence our discussion, so far, is open to obvious objections.
For, in talking about the good of loyalty, we have indeed appealed to human experience to show us wherein that good consists. But our very appeal also showed us that loyalty is good for a man precisely because he believes that his cause itself, even apart from his service, is good, and that both his cause and its goodness are realities, founded in facts which far transcend his individual life and his per sonal experience. Now, one may well doubt whether this belief of a loyal man is, in any individual case, a well-founded belief. And if it is not well founded, one may well ques tion whether the loyal man's good is not, after all, an illusory good, which will vanish from his experience as soon as he becomes enlightened. Since any instance of loyalty is subject to this sceptical inquiry, one may doubt whether even what we have called the supreme cause, that of loyalty to loyalty, is a good cause. For any or all loyalties may be founded in illusion, and then it would be an illusion that the fostering of loyalty amongst men is a finally worthy undertaking.
Objections of this sort are best stated by those to whom they actually occur as serious difficulties regarding the discussions contained in the foregoing lectures. A dear friend of mine, without receiving any instigation from me to help me by such an act, has so aptly summed up the objections here in question, that I can best show you precisely where we now stand by reading to you a portion of a letter which he has written to me, after hearing the first portion of my account of the good of loyalty.
"'Loyalty to loyalty," writes my friend, "doesn't seem ultimate. Is it not loyalty to all objects of true loyalty that is our ultimate duty? The object, not the relation, — the universe and the devotion to it, not the devo tion alone, is the object of our ultimate devo tion...Is it not the glory of this goal that lends dignity to all loyal search, — our own or that of others? It is because of this goal that we cheer on all to pursue it...It is because of what we believe about the end of the various loyalties that we are so glad of all the loyalties which make it possible to attain that end. The port gives value to the courses steering for it...Except for our knowl edge of the value of their destination, and of all life lived in quest of that destination, should we be anxious to urge all seekers along their courses?...Loyalty is a relation...Can we be loyal to anything, ultimately, except the universe which is the object of all love and all knowledge?"
So far my friend's statement of his difficulty. As you will see, from these two closing lec tures of my course which still remain, I cor dially share my friend's objection to the definition of loyalty so far insisted upon in these lectures. Our definition of loyalty, and of its relation to the ultimate good which the loyal are seeking, has so far been inadequate. But, as I told you in the opening lecture, we deliberately began with an inadequate defi nition of the nature of loyalty. We were obliged to do so. I expressly said this in my opening statement. Why we were obliged to do so, and why, thus far in these lectures, we have confined ourselves to developing and to illustrating the consequences of this im perfect definition of loyalty, our closing lec tures will of themselves, I hope, make clear.
A similar difficulty can be urged against any mere moralism, that is, against any purely ethical theory of the moral life. One wants a doctrine of the real world, or a religion, to help out one's ethics. For, as I have replied to my friend, morality, viewed by itself, has a character that can well be suggested by the parable of the talents. The moral life, re garded simply as the moral life, is the ser vice of a master who seems, to those who serve him, to have gone away into a far country. His servants have faith in him, but the service of his cause always has, for the moral, a certain mystery about it. They can indeed become sure, apart from any solu tion of this mystery, that their own supreme personal good lies in serving their lord. For not otherwise can they find even the relative peace that lies in a service of duty. But those who serve are not thus altogether secured against a pessimism regarding the whole outcome of human endeavor. For if loyalty is indeed our best, may not even this best itself be a failure?
Or, to use further the similitude of the parable of the talents: It may be indeed our supreme good to serve the master who has gone into the far country. Yet we do not merely want to serve him; we want, like Job, to meet him face to face. Suppose that we should discover the master to be indeed un worthy or a phantom or a deceiver, would even this, our best good, the service of his cause, seem permanently valuable? Should we not say, some day: To serve him was our best chance of life; but after all even that service was vanity.
In any case, our loyalty implies a faith in the master, — an assurance that life, at its best, is indeed worth while. Our philosophy of loyalty must therefore include an attempt to see the master of life himself, and to find out whether in truth he is, what our loyalty implies that he is, a master worth serving.
To sum up: So far we have defined the moral life as loyalty, and have shown why the moral life is for us men the best life. But now we want to know what truth is behind and beneath the moral life. With my friendly correspondent, we want to see the relation of loyalty to the real universe.
II What must be true about the universe if even loyalty itself is a genuine good, and not a merely inevitable human illusion?
Well, loyalty is a service of causes. A cause, if it really is what our definition re quires, links various human lives into the unity of one life. Therefore, if loyalty has any basis in truth, human lives can be linked in some genuine spiritual unity. Is such unity a fact, or is our belief in our causes a mere point of view, a pathetic fallacy? Surely, if any man, however loyal, discovers that his cause is a dream, and that men remain as a fact sundered beings, not really linked by genuine spiritual ties, how can that man re main loyal? Perhaps his supreme good in deed lies in believing that such unities are real. But if this belief turns out to be an illusion, and if a man detects the illusion, can he any longer get the good out of loyalty?
And as for even this personal good that is to be got out of loyalty, we have all along seen that such good comes to a loyal man's mind in a very paradoxical way. A loyal man gets good, but since he gets it by believ ing that his cause has a real existence outside of his private self, and is of itself a good thing, he gets the fascination of loyalty not as a private delight of his own, but as a ful filment of himself through self-surrender to an externally existing good, — through a will ing abandonment of the seeking of his own delight. And so the loyal man's good is essentially an anticipation of a good that he regards as not his own, but as existent in the cause. The cause, however, is itself no one fellow-man, and no mere collection of fellowmen. It is a family, a country, a church, or is such a rational union of many human minds and wills as we have in mind when we speak of a science or an art. Now, can such causes contain any good which is not simply a collection of separate human experiences of pleasure or of satisfaction? Thus, then, both the reality and the good of a loyal man's cause must be objects of the loyal man's belief in order that he should be able to get the experience of loyalty. And if his loyalty is indeed well founded, there must be unities of spiritual life in the universe such that no one man ever, by himself, experiences these unities as facts of his own consciousness. And these higher unities of life must possess a degree and a type of goodness, — a genuine value, such that no one man, and no mere collection of men, can ever exhaustively ex perience this goodness, or become personally possessed of this value.
How paradoxical a world, then, must the real world be, if the faith of the loyal is indeed well founded! A spiritual unity of life, which transcends the individual experience of any man, must be real. For loyalty, as we have seen, is a service of causes that, from the human point of view, appear superpersonal. Loyalty holds these unities to be good. If loyalty is right, the real goodness of these causes is never completely manifested to any one man, or to any mere collection of men. Such goodness, then, if completely experienced at all, must be experienced upon some higher level of consciousness than any one human being ever reaches. If loyalty is right, social causes, social organizations, friendships, fam ilies, countries, yes, humanity, as you see, must have the sort of unity of consciousness which individual human persons fragmentarily get, but must have this unity upon a higher level than that of our ordinary human individuality.
Some such view, I say, must be held if we are to regard loyalty as in the end anything more than a convenient illusion. Loyalty has its metaphysical aspect. It is an effort to conceive human life in an essentially super human way, to view our social organizations as actual personal unities of consciousness, unities wherein there exists an actual experi ence of that good which, in our loyalty, we only partially apprehend. If the loyalty of the lovers is indeed well founded in fact, then they, as separate individuals, do not constitute the whole truth. Their spiritual union also has a personal, a conscious existence, upon a higher than human level. An analogous unity of consciousness, an unity superhuman in grade, but intimately bound up with, and in clusive of, our apparently separate personali ties, must exist, if loyalty is well founded, wherever a real cause wins the true devotion of ourselves. Grant such an hypothesis, and then loyalty becomes no pathetic serving of a myth. The good which our causes possess, then, also becomes a concrete fact for an experience of a higher than human level. That union of self-sacrifice with self-assertion which loyalty expresses becomes a conscious ness of our genuine relations to a higher social unity of consciousness in which we all have our being. For from this point of view we are, and we have our worth, by virtue of our relation to a consciousness of a type superior to the human type. And meanwhile the good of our loyalty is itself a perfectly concrete good, a good which is present to that higher experi ence, wherein our cause is viewed in its truth, as a genuine unity of life. And because of this fact we can straightforwardly say: We are loyal not for the sake of the good that we privately get out of loyalty, but for the sake of the good that the cause — this higher unity of experience — gets out of this loyalty. Yet our loyalty gives us what is, after all, our supreme good, for it defines our true position in the world of that social will wherein we live and move and have our being.
I doubt not that such a view of human life, — such an assertion that the social will is a concrete entity, just as real as we are, and of still a higher grade of reality than ourselves, — will seem to many of you mythical enough. Yet thus to view the unity of human life is, after all, a common tendency of the loyal. That fact I have illustrated in every lecture of this course. That such a view need not be mythical, that truth and reality can be con ceived only in such terms as these, that our philosophy of loyalty is a rational part of a philosophy which must view the whole world as one unity of consciousness, wherein count less lesser unities are synthesized, — this is a general philosophical thesis which I must next briefly expound to you.
Ill My exposition, as you see, must be, in any case, an attempt to show that the inevitable faith of the loyal - - their faith in their causes, and in the real goodness of their causes — has truth, and since I must thus, in any case, dis course of truth, I propose briefly to show you that whoever talks of any sort of truth what ever, be that truth moral or scientific, the truth of common sense or the truth of a phi losophy, inevitably implies, in all his asser tions about truth, that the world of truth of which he speaks is a world possessing a rational and spiritual unity, is a conscious world of experience, whose type of conscious ness is higher in its level than is the type of our human minds, but whose life is such that our life belongs as part to this living whole.
This world of truth is the one that you must define, so I insist, if you are to regard any proposition whatever as true, and are then to tell, in a reasonable way, what you mean by the truth of that proposition.
The world of truth is therefore essentially a world such as that in whose reality the loyal believe when they believe their cause to be real. Moreover, this truth world has a good ness about it, essentially like that which the loyal attribute to their causes. Truth seek ing and loyalty are therefore essentially the same process of life merely viewed in two different aspects. Whoever is loyal serves what he takes to be a truth, namely, his cause. On the other hand, whoever seeks truth for its own sake fails of his business if he seeks it merely as a barren abstraction, that has no life in it. If a truth seeker knows his busi ness, he is, then, in the sense of our definition, serving a cause which unifies our human life upon some higher level of spiritual being than the present human level. He is therefore essentially loyal. Truth seeking is a moral activity; and on the other hand, morality is wholly inadequate unless the light of eternal truth shines upon it.
This, I say, will be my thesis. Some of you will call it very mystical, or at least a very fantastic thesis. It is not so. It ought to be viewed as a matter of plain sense. It is, I admit, a thesis which many of the most dis tinguished amongst my colleagues, who are philosophers, nowadays view sometimes with amusement, and sometimes with a notable impatience. This way of regarding the world of truth, which I have just defined as mine, is especially and most vivaciously attacked by my good friends, the pragmatists, — a group of philosophers who have of late been dis posed to take truth under their especial pro tection, as if she were in danger from the tendency of some people who take her too seriously.
When I mention pragmatism, I inevitably bring to your minds the name of one whom we all honor, — the philosopher who last year so persuasively stated, before the audience of this Institute, the pragmatist theory of philo sophical method, and of the nature of truth. It is impossible for me to do any justice, within my limits, to the exposition which Professor James gave of his own theory of truth. Yet since the antithesis between his views and those which I have now to indicate to you may be in itself an aid to my own exposition, I beg you to allow me to use, for the moment, some of his assertions about the nature of truth as a means of showing, by contrast, how I find myself obliged to interpret the same problem. The contrast is accompanied, after all, by so much of deeper agreement that I can well hope that my sketch of the current situation in the philosophical controversies about truth may not seem to you merely a dreary report of differences of opinion.
Professor James, in discussing the nature of truth, in his recent book on pragmatism, begins, as some of you will remember, by accepting the classic definition of truth as the agreement of our ideas with reality. Whoever knows or possesses a truth has, then, in his mind, an idea, an opinion, a judg ment, or some complex of such states of mind. If his views are true, then these his ideas or opinions are in agreement with something called reality. Thus, for instance, if a loyal man believes his cause, say, his friendship or his club or his nation, to be a reality, and if his belief is true, his loyal opin ion is in agreement with the real world. So far, of course, all of you will accept the defi nition of truth here in question.
Professor James now goes on to point out that, in some cases, our ideas agree with what we call real things by copying those things. So, if, with shut eyes, you think of the clock on the wall, your image of the clock is a copy of its dial. But, as my colleague continues, our power to copy real objects by ideas of our own is obviously a very limited power. You believe that you have at least some true ideas about many objects which are far too complex or too mysterious for you to copy them. Your power to become sure that your ideas do copy the constitution of anything whatever which exists outside of you is also very limited, be cause, after all, you never get outside of your own experience to see what the real things would be if taken wholly in themselves. Hence, on the whole, one cannot say that the agreement of our ideas with reality which constitutes their truth is essentially such as to demand that our ideas should be copies. For we believe that we have true ideas even when we do not believe them to be copies.
Moreover (and herewith we approach a consideration which is, for my colleague's theory of truth, very essential), not only does truth not consist merely in copying facts; but also truth cannot be defined in terms of any other static or fixed relation between ideas and facts. The only way to conceive that agreement between ideas and facts which constitutes truth is to think of the "practical consequences" which follow from possessing true ideas. "True ideas," in Professor James's words, "lead us, namely, through the acts and other ideas which they instigate, into or up to or towards other parts of experience